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Judge Dale Kimball has ordered the ailing firm to finally cough up the $2.5 million in royalties it owed Novell, plus interest, which runs to an extra $900,000.

But the saga may refuse to go away, as SCO has indicated it may appeal, arguing that the judge's original 2007 ruling was made before the full facts of the case had been agreed.

This final ruling quashes SCO's attempts

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to waive some of the claims in case of any appeal and reiterates his order this July to pay Novell the damages in restitution for Unix royalties SCO collected from Sun Microsystems without Novell's permission.

The original ruling sent SCO's fortunes into freefall. It was first delisted from the Nasdaq, then involved in a failed £100-million capital investment injection while trying to sell of the Unix business. It finally filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy late last year.

The saga all began when SCO originally brought the slander of title action suit against first IBM and then Novell, for infringing its Unix SVRX copyrights. But it emerged that, having bought the Unix trademarks from Novell a decade before, SCO assumed it also owned the rights to enter into open-source licence deals with Sun, as well as other end-user firms.

But when Kimball ruled the copyrights had, in fact, been Novell's all along, SCO was faced with a bill it couldn't pay.